Artist/ Band: Roger Powell
Title: Blue Note Ridge
Label: Unicorn Digital
Year of Release: 2009
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The Review:
- With Blue Note Ridge, Utopia keyboardist and solo composer Roger Powell returns with another album on the heels of Fossil Poets. While that album was a return to instrumental progressive rock, Blue Note Ridge, another original recording, counters its predecessor's carefully layered electronic sound with an immediacy and intimacy tapped by way of improvisational acoustic piano. Suitelike in its delivery and with deliberately more in common with Windham Hill than Wounded Bird, this recording is ripe with subtleties and deft shadings uncommon to run-of-the-mill solo piano releases. Parts of Ridge are melodic, and other parts are more ambient in nature, but never static, so to speak. Powell, who cut his teeth in one of prog's most well-known crossover acts, and before that gained renown with a landmark album of electronic music recorded exclusively with ARP's then state-of-the-art modular synthesizers, isn't one prone to extended sustain, or breves. "Blue In Grey," "Ghost Ripples," "Water Shed" and the opening piece, "Path To The River," all demonstrate, among others, the composer's flair for taste and articulation. Blue Note Ridge is devoid of Powell's penchant for electronics but is an altogether different animal and his enthusiasts owe it a spin or two.
Reviewed by Elias Granillo Jr. on July 23rd, 2010
Tracks:
- 01. Path To The River
- 02. Blue In Grey
- 03. Blue Note Ridge
- 04. Take To The Sky
- 05. Snowfall
- 06. Green Shaft
- 07. Flint Hill
- 08. Peace and Quiet
- 09. Ghost Ripples
- 10. Shadow of Pines
- 11. Valley Fog
- 12. First Light
- 13. Still Point
- 14. Watershed
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